paradisalogs | Time to see what's in the cards...

Entry tags:

Time to see what's in the cards...

Who: Clow and Felix
What: Divination and discussion thereof
When: Monday, October 1st
Where: Chimera workrooms
Rating: PG at most.

This was, rather decidedly, not how Clow would have liked to do this. Between not having his own cards to do it with - and that was a deep irony, right there - and the week's events had been, as he had told Felix, inauspicious. But he had the unfortunate sense that the castle was not going to let up - and trying to organize more than one or two mages together for something was generally about as easy as herding cats. Or getting Keroberos and Yue to agree to anything. So it might as well be now, and if he was particularly lucky, he'd know where his own cards were after this. For now, a tarot deck would do - it was one of the methods he'd learned, and they had, in a way, been a precursor to his own cards. So the slow shuffle, his magic pouring through them, was a familiar exercise as he waited for Felix to arrive.

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Felix turned down the hallway from the lobby, wondering what the other wizard had in store for him. This would be the second time somebody taught him about divination, but perhaps the first that the information had been offered free of conditions. He wondered if Clow would be the same as Mavortian, greedily guarding his deeper secrets. For what, exactly, Felix had never determined, outside of a general need to feel superior. The impulse didn't seem to be common to Clow either. Though perhaps the illusion of superiority didn't matter when you had the real thing. Felix had a vague sense of how powerful he was - enough to stir a little of that old wizard's disease in himself before he managed to squash it. That didn't matter, and if Clow could get them some answers, he could move the sun for all Felix cared.

He paused outside the door of the workroom Clow had chosen, giving him another flash of Mavortian as he silently shuffled the deck, then knocked politely on the doorframe to announce himself.

"Good afternoon."

The sound of the knock snapped Clow's focus back to the greater world around him - which included the bruises he'd gotten the day before complaining when he shifted to look at the doorway. He gave Felix a cheerful smile, though, and put the deck he'd been shuffling down on the table.

"Good afternoon. Feel free to pick a seat - I don't think anyone else is coming."

He moved into the room and sat lightly opposite Clow, arching a brow at Clow's injuries as well as the latter statement.

"Really? You couldn't persuade Howl this time?"

"I think he's convinced something's going to go horribly awry. And I wasn't in the mood to try and be persuasive."

Not to mention he also wasn't much in the mood to trade barbs, no matter how friendly, with the other wizard today. He glanced down at the deck of cards he'd been shuffling and frowned slightly.

"...In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have shuffled these first."

He smiled wryly at that. "If it does, I promise not to tell him about it."

"Shall I help you sort them?" he asked, holding out a hand

Clow grinned. "The vote of confidence is appreciated." He split the deck, and passed half of it over to Felix.

"There are four suits - wands, pentacles, cups, and swords. Those are the minor arcana. There's also a run of cards, zero through twenty-one, that have no suit. Those are the major arcana."

As he spoke, he started to sort his half of the deck, one pile for each suit, and another for the major cards.

Felix grinned back and flipped the cards face-up to inspect them, watching Clow a moment to see how he wished them arranged.

"Sounds more or less familiar. Cups were grails and wands were staves, though the meaning is fundamentally the same, I think," he said, idly laying out the cards, though slower for the fact that it took him a moment to identify the cards.

Clow nodded. "Some versions of the tarot deck use different names for some of the suits - including those. Wands - or staves - are though to be tied to the element of fire, and to creativity and will. Pentacles are earth, and refer to things in the material realm. Cups are water and emotions, and then swords are air and reason."

He finished sorting his half of the deck, and spread one of the piles out with a hand, so the individual cards could be seen. "Each suit runs ace, two through ten, page, knight, queen, and king. How much of that matches what you know?"

He again had a flash of the past in this conversation, though the tiny workroom he'd fashioned did not hold the barest candle to a parlor aside the Hall of Chimeras, no matter what pretending he managed in a name.

His eyes flicked over the cards and at last he tapped a finger on the ace.

"The same, except those were different. Instead there were the Sibyls - presumably from whence the deck borrowed it's name. The alt-cards, Marvortian called them."

"Sibyls..." Clow looked thoughtful - and curious. "From what I've gleaned, your world isn't a different Earth, but at the same time - in my world, that word has very ancient roots, and refers to female prophetesses in legend. Aces can be the highest or the lowest card in card games, though that property doesn't have much relevance in divination."

He settled back in his chair a little. "Perhaps... for your world, they were created outright as a means of divination. In mine, they were simply playing-cards first, but the symbology of the trumps drew people interested in using it for magical purposes as well. A great deal of magic is, after all, the symbols we use for it."

"Your guess is as good as mine in that area. I keep encountering small similarities from time to time - things that feel like more than chance. But the differences are too jarring for me to be sure. The maps don't match up, at least."

"As for the cards," he said, idly picking up one of the the court cards to examine the drawing, "you're correct. Magic is symbolism, and the trumps are the strongest for that to be sure. They are actually the only things I ever used on my own, not having been trained in the finer details of divination. I can't say the Sibylline developed in the same way, but it's likely it has similar roots."

"I suppose that would be a question for someone better-versed in planar theory than me - it was never really something I spent a great deal of time on, because nobody could ever figure out enough to even prove the idea sound."

Once everything was sorted, he pushed the piles of suit cards to the side of the table, and spread out the trumps neatly - handling cards had become second nature to him decades ago.

"These are the more important ones, then - are any of them familiar to you?"

The finesse of Clow's hands was another reminder to Marvortian, though he didn't handle them with the same obsessive nature, since this deck, newly acquired hadn't collected the near magnetic pull the Sibylline had.

He frowned and leaned forward, his lips thinning as he scanned the designs. All colorful and varied and unique, like the trumps he remembered, but almost none exactly like them.

"Only two." He paused to point them out in turn. "Death, and the Wheel."

Clow hummed thoughtfully at that as he sorted the trumps. If coincidence had a meaning, he wasn't sure what it was - not right now, anyway. "Well, I'll go through them in order, then." He pulled out The Fool. "This is the first card, and in some frameworks, also the last card. The Fool is openness, new beginnings - it can become anything."

He queued up the next few cards on the table in front of him. "The Magician comes next - creativity, initiative, one's own talents. I've always thought that rather fitting, myself. The High Priestess - serenity, mystical knowledge, intuition. The Empress is the idealized feminine - motherhood, beauty, sensuality, fertility. It's companion card is the Emperor - idealized masculine. Fatherhood, authority, stability, tradition."

He paused, shuffling those cards aside and readying the next batch. "...I should add, these are the general consensus on meaning, and the lands that formed them are perhaps not the most liberal or forward-thinking. I don't necessarily agree with all interpretations, though any reading is filtered through the experiences of the reader anyway.

"The Hierophant, which is usually thought to be the companion card to the High Priestess - knowledge, institution, respect. The Lovers - which can be a little misleading, as it can signify romance and pleasure, but also union and balance. The mating of yin and yang, as it were. The Chariot - perhaps unsurprisingly, a card of domination. Willpower, self-control, conviction, victory. Justice - which, like the Lovers, can represent the idea of justice itself, or the things that are related to it - objectivity, rationality, intellect. The Hermit - solitude, but also inner searching, reflection. The Wheel you know - cycles and changes. Strength - self control, patience, discipline.

"The Hanged Man - inaction, but also surrender and new points of view. It's tied to a number of myths of god who sacrificed something in order to gain greater knowledge of the world. Death - both loss and change, the ending of one cycle so another can begin. Temperance - harmony, balance, joining forces. The Devil - lust, egoism, anger. One of the few overall-negative cards, followed by what's generally considered the most negative - The Tower. The Tower is sudden catastrophe, chaos, downfall. It's follow-up isn't as bad, though - the Star is calmness, hope, and faith.

"The Moon is next - it can be a deceptive card, a card of uncertainty and illusions. It's companion is the Sun - optimism, vitality, enlightenment. Judgement is... well, judgement, but also forgiveness and reconciliation - a new beginning. It can get somewhat weighed down in religious baggage, though. And then the last card is the World - fulfilment, success, wholeness."

He stacked the cards he'd gone through back into a neat pile. "These are the sorts of things that scholars and readers alike will argue for ages about. My best advice is to let intuition guide you more than the meanings other people claim."

Felix considers these carefully, doing his best to remember any similarities to these cards and the Sibylline, though it was hard, having not had them in hand for almost two years. It occurred to him that perhaps he should write down what he remembered. At the time, he'd been trying to forget the castle had chosen to take them away from him.

There were commanilties, though, despite the differences in the card names. His eyes were drawn most notably to the Moon card - recalling the The Dead Tree and the fate that was tied to it.

He drew himself out of revelation as Clow started to stack the cards.

"Yes, well, that's the nature of symbols. They have power in their invested meaning but also subjectivity and flexibility. It's what makes them both useful and very confusing, especially to those who seek rigid definitions of everything," he said, thinking of Cabalines and all the science-minded people he'd encountered here.

"Where shall we start then? You're after something, I assume, other than entertaining me."

Clow grinned. "If you understand that much of symbology already, you're leagues ahead many of the mages I knew. I find with divination, trying to force conscious order on the symbols is particularly unhelpful - it's better to let your sub-conscious find meaning freely. Intuition, rather than logical thought - which is more difficult for mages of some schools than others."

He gathered up all the cards, and started shuffling them again, letting his magic run through them as he did so. "And yes, I did have a few questions I'd like to ask about this place - and one Howl requested. Did you have any?"

Felix waves the compliment away with a smile. The reasons he was open to the interpretations was mostly as a result of being fortunate enough to encounter people that could teach him to alter his ways of thinking - people like Iosephinus and Thamuris.

"Maybe. Can I ask what you were after, in the likely event that our interests coincide?"

"Good point," Clow said, grinning. "I'm hoping to find out a little more about the castle - and if possible, what's happened to our 'losses'. These cards may serve well enough for divining, but they aren't my cards, and I'd feel more comfortable knowing someone wasn't misusing them."

"Fair enough," he said, though he wasn't sure how wise it was to delve into the castle's motivations - he knew that dissuading Clow would be next to useless. It would have, had their positions been reversed. And it was just divination. The answers weren't solid. It might be open enough that it could give them a clue.

"I admit I have quite a few questions, but most of them are based on guesses. Do we ever truly go home? Why does it choose the people that it chooses? Did this world exist before it did, or is it part of the world? Where does it's power come from?"

A wry smile spread on his lips.

"But perhaps we should start easy."

Clow chuckled. "I think we'd better, yes - best see if we can get anything at all before starting in on two many specifics." He cut the full deck into three stacks with one hand, and then stacked them back up in a different order.

"Do you have a particular spread you favor, out of curiosity?"

"I've typically employed a nine card spread in a cross, as was taught to me by the original owner of the cards, at least when using the full deck. I actually found it was more useful to me to work with a three card spread with just the trumps, when divining for stronger symbols. Marvortian would probably call me something uncharitable for employing something that simplistic."

He smirked to himself as he watched Clow's hands work.

Clow laughed. "That sounds like most of the diviners I know. For people supposedly so open to the patterns of the future, they can be terribly close-minded about the methods used to scry it. The trumps alone are a powerful set of symbols, and three-card spreads are plenty adequate for some sorts of work. If it gives you good results, stick with it."

One final mix, and he dealt one of his usual spreads, a pyramid three cards tall on it's base. He set the remainder of the deck face-up on the table, looking at the bottom card first. He gave it a wry grin, and then flicked it out so Felix could see as well.

"Seven of pentacles, reversed - impatience and suspicion. I suppose I should be glad this deck knows me that well already."

The top of the pyramid came next, revealing the ace of cups. "The background knowledge for our problem - that of the losses. Inflexible wills... that could be commentary on the castle, or on my own stubbornness on not letting the matter drop. Hard to say as it stands."

He skipped the second row, and moved to the third. Four of swords, nine of pentacles, and The Star, inverted. He frowned, and then a vision took him, his eyes rather abruptly seeming to look at nothing at all. It was brief, just a glimpse - his book, sinking into a darkness that seemed nearly living in the way it coiled around it - but a glimpse was enough. When it passed, his lips thinned.

"I don't think I like that one bit."

"That's odd," Felix said, casting a concerned frown at the other wizard over the table.

"It's a conflicting reading, that's for certain. The Four of Swords. Meditation and respite from conflict. A reassurance that we're safe, or a warning, maybe, that this is our time to prepare for a battle. The Nine of Pentacles. Material wealth and comfort. Material reward. The representation for your cards, maybe? But this..."

He prodded the Star card with a finger and felt a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. "An inverted Star. The opposite of a future. There is no hope..."

Clow nodded. "I don't think there's any way to interpret the reading positively, even from the cards alone. And... I sometimes get glimpses of precognition, usually in dreams, but occasionally waking. It's rare that it's deliberately triggered while trying to do some other form of divination, but it happened now."

And even just the memory of what he'd seen is enough to spark a twist of fear - a rare feeling for him - and make his displeasure clear on his face. "I saw my cards being swallowed by darkness."

His brows knitted together in sympathetic worry.

"Yes, I see what you mean."

He swept the spread of cards into a pile again, uncomfortable with looking at them all of a sudden.

"I hope that fate is only temporary. For both our sakes."

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Time to see what's in the cards...

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/exposits forever

:P

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